I saw this sticker this weekend over the fuel door of a parked car. The caption reads 力油嘴呢? li you zui ne? and the “+93#” refers to the octane value. Freely translated, it means “You got the right nozzle?” The car is an Emgrand EC8 (the Chinese name is 帝豪品牌 di hao pinpai — literally, Grand or Heroic Imperial Brand), a luxury marque of the Geely Holding Co. of Zhejiang. Geely is already exporting these cars to the European Union, Africa and Asia, and may soon enter the US market. Geely is best known for buying Volvo from Ford Motor Co. last year. While I’m on the subject of cars, a few weeks ago I rode in the back seat of a co-worker’s Škoda automobile, which had the roomiest back seat second only to a Checker Cab (or a Hudson Hornet). Škoda is a Czech brand that exports to China and other Asia-Pacific countries, and the UK. His model would be equivalent to a Buick Regal, another popular upscale car in China among those who can’t afford the stratospheric prices of a BMW or a Mercedes.

JISHOU, HUNAN — One of my students showed me this video, from a website called Hujiang English Network. The guy in the vid shows us how to speak English with a Mandarin accent (not a Canto accent — so, you won’t sound like a Hong Kong action movie). Although he’s joking around, the way some Chinese pronounce English comes out sounding just like he says it does. Chinese is a tonal language: every syllable has one of four tones** (nine tones for Cantonese) and each syllable is pronounced distinctly. A Chinese may try to speak English words the same way, so it comes out sounding like machine-gun fire. (Native English speakers tend to connect words together, dontcha know?) And, as he notes, Chinese will substitute Mandarin words for English words that sound similar, like du 琽 = “stopped up” for “do,” ti 踢 = “kick” for “tea/tee/tip.” If you visit the Hujiang link, they have the “translations” of the not-so-obvious phonetic substitutions he makes. Here they are, with the real meanings next to them. downtown = 当烫！(dang1 tang4 = when hot!) gun = 刚！(gang1 = hard!) big gun = 大刚！(da4 gang1 = really hard!) job = 脚脖子！(jiao3 bo2 zi – ...